CASE STUDY Borderon et fils

From the order to the dough

[Client]
Borderon et fils
[Service]
Process automation
[Industry]
Bakery
From the order to the dough

Client

Founded in 1993, Borderon et fils is a bakery operating at industrial scale. Its trade customers — restaurants, hotels, grocers — are delivered to every morning, and six shops sell part of the output at retail. We have been building their systems since 2019.

The problem

Before we arrived, everything was done by hand. An order came in by phone, was written on a scrap of paper, copied out again for the bakehouse, then keyed a third time for invoicing. Production lists were drawn up separately — bread, viennoiserie and pastry each on their own — and the shop tills were cut off from everything else. Every transcription was a chance to get it wrong, and the total ran into thousands of dollars.

The challenge

Putting the customer's order, the dough for two days out and Saturday morning's till on one single spine.

Borderon had gone looking for a system. Off-the-shelf tills exist, and so do specialised ERPs, but none of them could do what a bakery demands: take the order online, then work back to the dough that has to be mixed forty-eight hours before delivery. A bakery runs the calendar backwards — the delivery time sets the mixing time, not the other way around.

What we built

One way in

A single extranet: trade customers place their own orders, and the six shops order through the same interface. Each one sees its own catalogue, at its own prices. Every product carries its own minimum lead time — twelve hours for some, forty-eight for others — set by the dough it takes.

The dough, worked out backwards

From the total of the orders, the system works back to the raw material: the dough. It groups everything sharing a recipe, applies the required lead time and produces the day’s mixes. The dough is mixed once, then split by product type. Someone shapes it, baking follows, and the products are packed customer by customer before they ship.

Information at every station

Bread, pastry, viennoiserie, shaping, packing: each trade has its list on screen rather than on paper, with the actions that go with it. The packer marks a batch done, customer by customer, and that batch drops out of everyone’s queue.

The till, synced to the web and to management

The tills sync continuously: sales are available to managers in real time. The same tills handle goods received, the evening stock count and staff clock-in. And if the internet goes down mid-rush, they keep working — the data goes back up as soon as the connection returns.

Results

  1. [01] 9,000 orders a year, from the customer portal through to the invoice.
  2. [02] Six shops and seven tills on one system, in real time.
  3. [03] Seasonal peaks read year over year. Christmas is no longer planned from memory.
Seven years on, the system is still running — and it has absorbed a complete reversal of the business model. At the start, 90% of revenue came from trade customers: this was a bakery factory with a shopfront. Today the ratio is inverted. An off-the-shelf package would not have held up. Theirs followed, because it was written around their trade rather than the reverse.